Netrunner is a Debian-based distribution featuring a highly customised KDE desktop with extra applications, multimedia codecs, Flash and Java plugins, and a unique look and feel. The modifications are designed to enhance the user-friendliness of the desktop environment while still preserving the freedom to tweak. A separate "Rolling" edition, based on Manjaro Linux, was launched in 2014, was discontinued and was re-launched in 2017.

To compare the software in this project to the software available in other distributions, please see our Compare Packages page.

Notes: In case where multiple versions of a package are shipped with a distribution, only the default version appears in the table. For indication about the GNOME version, please check the "nautilus" and "gnome-shell" packages. The Apache web server is listed as "httpd" and the Linux kernel is listed as "linux". The KDE desktop is represented by the "plasma-desktop" package and the Xfce desktop by the "xfdesktop" package.

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Past reviews - sort by:

Version:Rating: 10Date: 2018-09-10Votes: 3

This review is for the rolling release version Netrunner 2018.8. I just want to say how much I appreciate what this distribution does for you out of the box making things easy to do even if only booting off of a live usb. The little things it does by default are great as a general desktop user and consumer of online and offline media. I have this running on an old i3 m 330 @2.13 ghz clock processor toshiba satellite laptop with 8 gb of ram and integrated intel graphics, the performance for everything I've tried so far is among the best I've gotten out of any distribution I've tried. Things that "just work" for this distro in live environment are as follows, high quality youtube videos play with no problem, high quality html5 video on other video websites such as twitch . tv play no problem, flash working by default and performing very well tested by playing flash games on newgrounds . com , all video and audio codecs already installed for every file format I have on my internal hard drive ( .mp3, .mkv, .webm, all work). Because the codecs are already installed on the system it uses mpv media player and has smplayer installed as a front end for it to make navigating and changing settings during playback easier. I like to watch anime from time to time and the subtitles for my .mkv files just worked, there are some files I have that have japanese characters in them and they displayed properly in the file manager and firefox by default, firefox comes with an adblocking extension installed for you (ublock origin) and though I've booted it live from usb surfing with firefox I don't see the flash drive being accessed so it's not thrashing the flash drive with reads/writes while I surf, the two gui software apps work simple and well octopi and discover, you can access the AUR with octopi, compiled and installed orion a twitch gui application that uses qt5 from it in 2 mins up and running. Very fast/light kde on old hardware and did everything I wanted it to do. No critique because I'm impressed.

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Version:Rating: 3Date: 2018-08-26Votes: 3

This it the rolling release 2018.8

I had read the reviews so decided to give it a go. It has to be the most responsive plasma5 distro I have tried. WOW. It looks good and it can be made to look fantastic. BUT. Palemoon could not be run. KDE's on Falkon could not be run. Both crashed as soon as you tried to do anything with them on a fully updated 8th gen system! Every other distro and desktop ran perfectly! No burner is included! So I installed K3b. I had to install other programs before it would burn another distro! I was shocked to discover that KDE had removed the drag to resize feature from the DE!?!?! The most basic DE does that!! No, in plasma you have to right click on the title bar then select "more actions" then click on "resize" and this only works on the bottom right corner!!! If you want to bring the top left corner of the window down and to the right to resize the window you have to bring the bottom right corner up and then go through the whole process again to move the whole window! Are you f'n kidding? If this is the "new" direction Linux in general and KDE in particular are going the future does not look good! You can dress "her" up, give her a hairdo, put on a bit of makeup, but inside you still have a ____! At first the pretty face had me excited but the deeper I dug, the more it turned sour. The base of the distro is the best there is. There is nothing faster or more stable but all that effort is ruined, utterly wasted on a microsoft inspired disaster! I can easily understand why Mint is dropping plasma5 and why other distros still don't offer it!

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Version: 18.03Rating: 5Date: 2018-08-24Votes: 1

This is a conflicting review I realize however out of the box, you are installing a "zombie" distro that will quickly become a security hazard.

1) Out of the box it is a completely "fixed" distro. There will never be updates released unless you enable the "testing" repository.

2) You are repeatedly warned in the forums to not enable the testing repository in the forums, as it can break your system. (the same is true of running testing without Netrunner, to be fair! this is why Manjaro has their own repositories to provide a more stable rolling experience.)

3) All that being said this absolutely is a rock solid OS. Every other distro I've tried on my i7 7XXX NUC has had problems. Manjaro runs super fast, but has constant browser crashes. I got so sick of it, that I did install other distros, until I stopped at Netrunner as it was stable, and I've not EVER seen tabs crash like they were in Manjaro. (This was in every web browser I tried on that system)

* PC Linux OS hard locked twice and updated itself to death.
* Open SUSE tumbleweed felt unstable, and slow. I couldn't even get their stable branch to boot.
* Siduction was massively unstable, and I have no desire of switching Netrunner to that repository after experiencing that.

So what's my overall review?

Even though I've scored it low as an out of the box experience, IT IS the best Linux I've tried for this machine. I switched to the stable branch (currently Stretch) to make sure I'm getting the security updates still. So far this has provided a stable experience.